Eighty-six years ago today, Pablo Picasso was amid an explosion of creativity, the results of which are on display at the National Gallery of Canada.

Man & Beast is an exhibit of the Vollard Suite of Prints, which Picasso created during the 1930s as turmoil heaved his personal life and his Spanish homeland, and the world careered towards war. All of that upset is reflected in the 100 etchings and drypoints, which, while they have no defining narrative, do follow an arc of increasing darkness.

Picasso began the series in 1930, and the bulk of the set was created during a creative burst between March and June of 1933. The first two etchings, drawn Sept. 13 and 16, 1930, are rudimentary line drawings, and stylistically they stand apart from the 98 drawings that follow — another sign that Picasso did not conceive the works as a single project. The grouping came later at the behest of Ambroise Vollard, the French art dealer who had earlier discovered Picasso (and was instrumental to Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh and others).

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Picasso completed the suite in 1937, the same year he painted his huge masterpiece Guernica, a view of a Spanish town that was ruthlessly bombed during the Spanish Civil War.

Two years later, 230 sets of the suite were printed, not long before Vollard died. By then the Second World War was under way, so the suite was not offered for collection until the 1950s. The National Gallery acquired its suite in 1957, and not since then has the full set been exhibited in Ottawa.

“We’re one of (a few) museums worldwide to have the full series, because, as often happens with large ensembles, they get broken up and sold individually,” said exhibition curator Sonia Del Re. “This is a true masterpiece of modern engraving, one of the highlights of Picasso’s very long career.”

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The set is “sexual in nature,” as a caution declares at the entrance to the exhibition, though by today’s cultural standards the non-graphic sex seems more decorous than debauched.

Picasso’s relationships were always fluid, and when he began the suite he was still married to Olga Khokhlova, though having an affair with the French teenager Marie Thérèse Walter. Before the suite was complete, he would find another mistress in Dora Maar.

Del Re says the works show the “great tension” between and the “exploration of the artist’s relationship to his artwork and creation, and to his models and muses.” To be more succinct, “He’s thinking about this idea of the artist being continually torn between creating, and making love.”

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Picasso is embodied in the drawings as the minotaur, the man-bull of Greek mythology. A giant photograph on an exhibition wall shows Picasso in a characteristic pose on a French beach, wearing nothing but swim trunks and a bull head.

The 100 artworks are arranged chronologically. Their scenes are usually set in the artist’s studio, and over their course an abiding sense of calm and tranquility gives way to violence, and perhaps rape.

By the end — as Spain contracts in civil war, and Marie-Thérèse gives birth to Picasso’s child — the minotaur has become blind and his world increasingly dark. Ultimately, Del Re said, “the blind minotaur is in complete darkness and the figure of Marie-Thérèse leads the way.”

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Throughout the exhibition, Picasso’s own words describe the suite in text on the walls. The phrases are sometimes self-deprecating — “The one sitting down looks like a model of Matisse’s who had decided to try another painter and now that she’s seen the results, she’s wishing she’d stayed home” — and sometimes macabre — “He’s studying her, trying to read her thoughts, trying to decide whether she loves him because he’s a monster. . . It’s hard to say whether he wants to wake her or kill her.”

(The quotes, incidentally, are from a book by Françoise Gilot, who succeeded Maar in the parade of mistress, and who gave Picasso two more offspring, including his best-known child Paloma, the fashion designer.)

The exhibition, like this review, closes with the etching Minotaurmachy. It was created in 1935, and though it is not a part of the Vollard Suite it is thematically complementary. Moreover, a wall panel explains, it “is regarded . . . as Picasso’s most important print.”

So, the most important print from the 20th century’s most important artist. To not visit the gallery to see it would be bullheaded, indeed.

Picasso: Man & Beast. The Vollard Suite of PrintsWhen & where: April 29 to Sept. 5 at the National GalleryView on Ottawa Citizen

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